RE: are we the ISDTF? was: Let's look at it from an IETF oldie's perspective... Re: IPv4 Outage Planned for IETF 71 Plenary

It is a different conception of engineer.

My conception of being an engineer is similar to that of a doctor over a nurse practitioner. A doctor has to be able to do any of the minor surgical performed by nurse practitioners (removing stitches, injections, etc.) but that is not where they provide input.

In the Roman army the engineers were the soldiers that designed the fortifications, roads, seige engines etc. The actual manual labor was performed by enlisted men and slaves.

My conception of Internet engineering is that we are rather too fond of performing the equivalent of manual labor. Configuring machines should not be work for any human, let alone an engineer. We need to become more intollerant of the need for configuration hackery, not less.

The computer asks to connect to the network and the network figures out how to support it. If the machine only knows how to ask for an IPv4 address its the job of the network to just figure it out.

________________________________

From: john.loughney@gmail.com [mailto:john.loughney@gmail.com]
Sent: Thu 20/12/2007 12:34 PM
To: Lucy Lynch
Cc: Bob Braden; ietf@ietf.org
Subject: are we the ISDTF? was: Let's look at it from an IETF oldie's perspective... Re: IPv4 Outage Planned for IETF 71 Plenary

Are we the Internet Standardization Development Task Force? It seems by this thread, many of us are afraid to do any engineering and just work on emails and paper.  
I don't know about others, but I always liked testing some new technology at IETF meetings, but that seems less common these days.
John

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